Tony Gachoka has his way of saying things – just as it is. He cannot understand why Raila Odinga – as he says – is sneaking back to former president Moi by pretending that he want to Kabarak Church to pray, and that he met Moi accidentally already seated in the church. The fact is that he wants Moi’s support to get some of Rift Valley’s votes. Is this not becoming desperate; asks Gachoka - a man who worked for Raila before and now says he became uncomfortable working for him and instead chose to run very fast – a run from a man he says is a dictator by nature.

Gachoka commends Miguna Miguna, who was Raila’s advisor, for being brave enough to write a book that exposes Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s corrupt deals.
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Gachoka castigate Raila, a man who was harassed by the previous regime, for seeking refuge from his tormentor - the former president at Kabarak recently, pretending to pray and yet he was seeking political mileage..

Gachoka says, he decided to be man enough when Moi’s regime tormented him by refusing to seek refugee status outside thew country as Raila did by running to Norway where he stayed safe for about one year before sneaking back to the country. Gachoka characterises the act as cowardice.

Related:

• Tony Gachoka says Prime Minister Raila Odinga is a man full of hatred

End

LONDON,  – No one can say they did not see last year’s food crisis in East Africa coming; there was almost a year of increasingly strong warnings, but it was not until Somalia was formally declared to be in a state of famine that substantial funding finally started coming in.

After this, just the latest of a long series of failures to translate early warnings into timely action, researchers at London’s Chatham House embarked on a project to try to find out why.

Rob Bailey, who is leading the project, says previous research had tended to focus on technical issues. “If only we could improve the early warning information; if only we could improve the way organizations coordinate with each other, then we would be able to get a better response. This has been the focus in research and policymaking for the past couple of decades, and yet it has only really demonstrated marginal improvements at best, and it did nothing at all in the case of Somalia last year.”

Instead Bailey says he wants to understand why delay is the typical outcome of the decision-making process, and why politicians, nationally and internationally, might be unwilling to acknowledge a crisis and respond early on. Some pointers have already emerged.

Participants in discussions organized by the project have suggested that the current pressure for greater accountability and value for money may cause problems.

A drought is no one’s fault, but the decision to spend large sums of public money on a crisis which doesn’t materialize can be traced back to an individual, with potentially career-threatening consequences. And modern communication systems, like email, can diffuse information widely, while allowing everyone to leave the decision to someone else. Something as simple as demanding an explicit decision, even if that decision is not to act, could remove some of the perverse incentives to inaction.

Decision-makers also prefer a high degree certainty, for instance over how many people are going to die if they do not take action, and that is a degree of certainty that forecasters do not always feel able to give. Gary Eilerts, programme manager for USAID’s Famine Early Warning System, FEWS NET, says rapid improvements in communications mean that the forecasts are now more accurate than ever before.

“It’s much easier to get information from distant localities,” he told IRIN, “and of a much broader nature, and it’s just increased everybody’s ability to understand what’s going on… but there’s still a substantial residue of uncertainty when we put all these indicators and this data together, so that we can still have a divergence in how people analyse it, and how we determine what the right response should be.”

And FEWS NET deals with governments – just one or two people in each country, says Eilerts. “We put a high premium on trying to work within regional and national systems,” he says, “because ultimately they have the responsibility to the people.”

A Question of Dignity

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So a lot of the speed of response depends on the systems – and the attitude – of national governments. Systems can be improved. The annual rainfall pattern across the Sahel means that as early as October it is clear whether or not the rains have been adequate, and whether there is likely to be a food crisis the following year. Mandatory meetings scheduled in October to review the position and consider a menu of options could start the ball rolling sooner.

The primacy of politics

But technical improvements can only do so much; beyond a certain point it is down to politics. Last year in East Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia responded very differently. In Kenya the food crisis disproportionately affected Somali-speaking areas. Kenya has a substantial number of Somali-speaking voters, and an election on the horizon. And if the government had any doubts that the issue was important to its electorate, they would have been dissipated by the impressive public response to a Kenyan Red Cross appeal for the affected area.

For the Ethiopian government the political dynamic was different, with less likelihood of being voted out of office for a slow response, and a strong desire to change the international discourse on Ethiopia from drought and famine, to investment and opportunity. The consequent reluctance to publicly declare a crisis meant a late and less effective response.

But they did acknowledge a problem. In the most notorious example of politics negating early warning, the former President of Niger, Mamadou Tandja, denied there was famine or even hunger in his country despite having the most effective national early warning system in West Africa, something which eventually contributed to his overthrow in a coup d’etat.

The man now in charge of Niger’s food security programme, Amadou Allahoury Diallo, says the early warning system remained in place, even during the period when the government was refusing to recognize its warnings. “Even though it denied the figures,” Allahoury Diallo told IRIN, “the government still needed an information system; it could do what it chose with that information, but it still needed to know.”

So what makes a government see a crisis and refuse to act? Allahoury Diallo says it is a state of mind. “Maybe the government was embarrassed, or ashamed to admit how bad the situation was. Nowadays we think differently. We have a democratically elected government which is under an obligation to deliver. And we know that even if you lie to the outside world, you can’t lie to your own people, since they are living with the reality of the situation every day.”

Chatham House is finding that a lot comes back to politics. Says Rob Bailey: “A lot of it comes down to trying to understand the incentives that politicians themselves are operating under – what are the costs and benefits that they are weighing up in their own minds when deciding whether or not to respond to early warnings.

“Then the question becomes: ‘How can you begin to shift that political calculus? How can you try to reduce the costs that politicians might incur from responding early, and how can you increase the benefits, the rewards that they might reap if they are able to prevent a crisis?’ Finally, institutions matter, but politics matter most.”

eb/cb
source www.irinnews.org

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Photo: Siegfried Modola/IRIN

Too early to celebrate…:South Sudan is facing a myriad of challenges (file photo)

JUBA,  – As South Sudan marked its first year of independence on 9 July, room for optimism looks limited: the economy is in free-fall, development plans are on hold as humanitarian crises take precedence, and there is a real fear of a major escalation of hostilities with Sudan.

IRIN takes a look at some of the key challenges facing the world’s newest country, one still struggling to emerge from the devastation wreaked by decades of civil war.
 
What are the prospects for defusing tensions with Khartoum?
 
Months of talks led by the African Union have yet to bear fruit. In early April, the two Sudans embarked on a month-long war on the undefined border they had agreed to start demarcating. South Sudan occupied oil fields in a disputed area that produces around half of Sudan’s oil output, while Khartoum’s counter-insurgency operations have included bombing raids allegedly up to 70km inside South Sudan.

Security agreements, including on a demilitarized zone along the border, have stalled, and each side claims the other is funding rebel groups within its borders.

Sudan has repeatedly accused South Sudan of supporting rebels in the border states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile who during the 1983-2005 civil war were part of the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army. Juba maintains that the northern wing of the insurgency, SPLA-N, has operated independently since secession.

As well as these security issues, rapprochement also depends on reaching agreements on sharing oil-revenue, demarcating the border, and establishing citizenship rights.

Border clashes started just days before the two countries were supposed to sign a deal that would respect the “four freedoms” regarding citizenship. In April, some 14,000 people awaiting transport to South Sudan were evicted from the Sudanese river port of Kosti, White Nile State, forcing aid agencies to bus people up to Khartoum and fly them to Juba.
 
Up to half a million Southerners are still living in Sudan.
 
What about internal conflict?
 
Ethnic clashes and cattle-rustling in a country awash with guns are a serious threat to stability. Thousands of people have been killed in cattle rustling incidents and related violence.

In late December, up to 8,000 youths from the Lou Nuer ethnic group, joined by some Dinka, marched on members of the minority Murle in neglected Jonglei State, killing hundreds, according to the UN, and thousands according to local officials.

The violence displaced over 160,000 people, and spawned a host of smaller attacks in which hundreds more were killed. This prompted a large-scale civilian disarmament operation in Jonglei State.

While South Sudan has followed a policy of “paying for peace” by integrating militias into its already swollen army, analysts say a worrying trend in the politicization of ethnic groups could see the nation turn on itself if the government fails to prosecute those responsible for attacks.

Photo: UNEP

Oil well drilling pits at Heglig, central Sudan (file photo): South Sudan briefly occupied Heglig raising fears of all-out war

Where is the economy heading?

When South Sudan seceded in July 2011, taking with it 75 percent of the former Sudan’s oil wealth, hopes were high that the new nation could start building a rudimentary infrastructure and provide basic services to its people.
 
However, a row over how much Juba should pay Khartoum in transit and other fees (the oil is exported from Sudan), led South Sudan to halt production entirely in January 2012 – a move that turned off 98 percent of Juba’s income and led to a package of austerity measures. But even before the shut-down, few South Sudanese outside Juba or the security forces – who account for an estimated half of government expenditure – had benefited significantly from the oil revenue.

The latest government figures showed year-on-year inflation at 80 percent in May. Food and fuel prices are particularly affected since these are for the most part imported and, in the absence of oil income, there are far fewer dollars available to pay for them. 

How serious is corruption?

Corruption is rampant in a country which for a while enjoyed billions of petrodollars but is still setting up financial management systems.
 
A 3 May letter from President Salva Kiir to 75 former and current officials requested that US$4 billion looted from the state’s coffers be paid back “partial or full” to a government bank account in Kenya.
 
“We fought for freedom, justice and equality… yet once we got to power, we forgot what we fought for and began to enrich ourselves at the expense of our people,” the letter reads.

Development interrupted
 
The oil shutdown and corruption have shaken donors, with many starting to switch development funds to humanitarian assistance in a country which has seen about 30 emergencies in its first year of existence.
 
The $6.4 billion 2012-2013 budget which takes effect this month is down from $10.2bn last year, and “less than half of it they may have resources for”, said George Conway, head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in South Sudan.

“Long-term and emergency efforts to help nearly half the population who don’t have enough to eat could be derailed by an economy out of control,” Oxfam warned in a 6 July statement.
 
“We must not allow the large investments in agriculture, water, education and other services to be undone by the economic crisis and increase in conflict. The longer this crisis drags on, the greater the risk South Sudan’s development will slip backwards, and its vast potential will be unrealized,” said Helen McElhinney, an Oxfam policy adviser in South Sudan.
 

Photo: Siegfried Modola/IRIN

Donors often compare the dire health situation in South Sudan to Afghanistan’s (file photo)

Is the health service up to scratch?
 
UNDP says the health sector has seen little improvement, with aid agencies, rather than the government, still providing the bulk of services. At Juba Teaching Hospital – the country’s finest – an acrid smell pervades the gloomy, packed wards.
 
“The [580-bed] hospital is so small and the [patients] just keep increasing,” said CEO Akajomsuk Moi.
 
“As you can see, there are people lying on the floor,” he said, gesturing to people sprawled on thin mats all over the compound, some with drainage bags coming out of their sides and others crying out in pain.

With 2,000 deaths per 100,000 live births, “it is still the case that a 15-year-old girl has more chance of dying in childbirth than completing school,” said Conway.
 
UNDP says one of South Sudan’s successes has been to reduce child mortality, but the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says not enough has been done. “Despite a decrease in under-five mortality, an estimated one in nine children die before their fifth birthday and 20 percent are malnourished,” it said.
 
South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, and donors often compare the dire health situation here to Afghanistan’s. 
 
“According to the Ministry of Health, South Sudan has about 120 medical doctors and just over 100 registered nurses for an estimated population of nearly nine million people,” the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a 6 July statement. This is 10 times fewer doctors per thousand people than in neighbouring Kenya which has 14 doctors per 100,000 people, it said.
 
Doctors say that during frequent power cuts they sometimes operate by mobile phone flashlight, as there is no money to buy fuel for generators.
 
Nadim Philip said that when he came to work at the Juba hospital four years ago, he saw mothers dying in childbirth every few days. Now, such deaths were occurring every few weeks or months, due to simple measures such as teaching staff to stop blood loss by giving oxytocin. But the real lack of training for medical staff was still causing needless deaths, he said. “Sometimes you write a prescription and it’s not followed. The nurses are not trained.”

UNDP says nearly 30 percent of the population still has no access to primary health care, and that as austerity bites, state hospitals will struggle to buy medicines.
 
“The country is prone to diseases, with meningitis, measles, yellow fever, and whooping cough endemic in many areas. Preventable diseases such as malaria and acute respiratory infections are the leading causes of ill health. River blindness, sleeping sickness, and cholera are also common,” says ICRC, which is also concerned about the rising number of admissions of malnourished children to its hospital in Malakal, Upper Nile State. It adds that there is very little help for an estimated 50,000 disabled people. 
 

Photo: UNESCO/B. Desrus

…But school enrolments have doubled since 2005

How many children are completing primary school?

“Seventy percent of children aged 6-17 have never set foot in a classroom, and the completion rate in primary schools is barely 10 percent,” UNICEF said in a 7 July statement.

“Girls remain particularly disadvantaged when it comes to their opportunity to [get an] education and are vulnerable to harmful social practices of early marriage and early child-bearing”, it added.

School enrolment has doubled since 2005, but according to Gerald Magashi, the acting country director for Plan, an NGO, “there are serious questions as to whether these eager children are receiving any learning at all.”

At 27 percent, the country also has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.

Despite the government’s pledge to safeguard education spending (about 6 percent of the budget), UNDP fears that education gains could be reversed by the watering down of government plans to build schools.
 
What are conditions like for refugees?

The UN says some 175,000 people have fled to South Sudan from South Kordofan and Blue Nile states since conflicts there broke out in June and September 2011 respectively.

In Jamam camp, in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State, aid agencies fear for the survival of around 40,000 refugees from Blue Nile who have faced chronic water shortages since the start of the year resulting in many diarrhoeal diseases.
 
Heavy rains in early July left the camp underwater and flooded latrines, contaminating water sources and leading to increased cases of hypothermia and malaria. “Living conditions in Jamam are now simply unacceptable,” said Médecins Sans Frontières emergency coordinator Tara Newell. 
 
“What’s needed is for all agencies involved, led by the UNHCR, to join together to come up with a solution that can remove these refugees from the health risks associated with the dire living conditions in the camp. We have to proceed with a great sense of urgency,” Newell added.
 
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Unity State, UNHCR recently voiced concern about the deteriorating health situation in Yida camp, where since April 500-1,000 people have been arriving daily from Sudan’s South Kordofan State.
 
The site has grown by a third to around 60,000 refugees in recent months, as people flee hunger and bombs in South Kordofan.
 
“Health partners are reporting increasing cases of diarrhoea among refugees [in Yida], raising grave concerns about the risk of disease outbreak,” said Marie-Helene Verney, head of UNHCR’s Bentiu office in Unity State.
 
How can food insecurity be eased?
 
Nearly half of South Sudan’s 9.7 million people are food insecure, meaning they lack reliable access to food sufficient to maintain an active healthy life.
 
A combination of poor rains, the return since October 2010 from Sudan of more than 400,000 citizens, internal conflict and a spike in food prices has prompted the World Food Programme to foresee feeding around 2.7 million people this year. 
 
“Some people are living on one meal a day, and double the number of people are in need of food aid compared to last year”, said Oxfam’s McElhinney.
 
With refugees still streaming over the border, the economy plummeting and rains cutting off 60 percent of the roads in South Sudan, the number of people needing emergency assistance looks set to rise.
 
The government has urged people – in a nation that imports 70 percent of its food and where only 5 percent of the land is cultivated – to start planting.
 
“South Sudan has the potential to feed itself, and could be a breadbasket for the region. Instead, renewed conflict and severe economic downturn means more people face food shortages now than since the 2005 peace deal,” said McElhinney.

hm/cb/am source www.irinnews.org

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Photo: Obinna Anyadike/IRIN

LGBTI refugees are often forced to hide their sexuality

JOHANNESBURG,  – As a gay man living in Tanzania, Cassim Mustapha could have faced imprisonment, but prosecutions under the country’s Sexual Offences Act are rare, and the bigger threat came from his own community. After one of his neighbours attacked him with an axe leaving a deep wound in his head, Mustapha fled and applied for asylum in Malawi, the first country he reached.

Persecution relating to an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity is increasingly recognized by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and in refugee law as grounds for claiming asylum. Most such claims are based on the 1951 Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee as someone having a well-founded fear of persecution because of “membership of a particular social group”.

However, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals fail to gain asylum on this basis, either because they are unaware they can do so or because the officials determining their refugee status do not recognize such claims. This was the case for Mustapha in Malawi, one of 37 countries in Africa that criminalize homosexuality. He moved on to Zambia and tried again, with the same result.

After a third failed asylum application in Zimbabwe, another country that bans same-sex practices, he was advised by UNHCR that his best chance lay in South Africa, a country where the rights of LGBTI people are protected by the constitution and where refugee law spells out persecution relating to sexuality as grounds for asylum.

UNHCR issued Mustapha with a temporary travel document and he presented himself at the Beitbridge border post where he told immigration officials he wished to apply for asylum based on his sexuality.

“They just said, `Where is your passport?’ and when I didn’t have it, they arrested me,” he told IRIN from a cell at Musina police station in late January.

Assuming, there had been a misunderstanding, Mustapha made contact with Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), an NGO which campaigns for the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in South Africa.

“He was very open about [his sexuality],” said LHR lawyer Wayne Ncube who interviewed Mustapha at Lindela Repatriation Centre outside Johannesburg where he was transferred soon after speaking to IRIN. “He thought he was finally somewhere where his rights would be protected.”

Ncube prepared court papers requesting the Tanzanian’s release but by the time he returned to Lindela four days later, Mustapha had been deported to Zimbabwe.

“We haven’t heard from him since,” said Ncube.

Discrimination

A study released recently by People Against Suffering Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP), a Cape Town-based refugee and migrant rights NGO, suggests that while Mustapha’s experience is not the norm, LGBTI refugees and asylum seekers drawn to South Africa from other parts of the continent by its progressive reputation and legislation, experience high levels of discrimination, not just for being gay but also for being foreign.

Most of the 25 LGBTI refugees and asylum seekers interviewed by PASSOP had experienced discrimination as they sought accommodation, employment, social inclusion and documentation. The combination of xenophobia and homophobia negatively affected their interactions with landlords, employers, police and Home Affairs officials. Shunned by the refugee community for their sexuality, their status as foreigners tended to exclude them from Cape Town’s well-established gay community.

The PASSOP report also found that almost half of those interviewed had not stated their sexual orientation or gender identity in their asylum claims, in most cases because they did not know this was a valid reason for seeking refugee status. Of the 14 interviewees who had stated their sexuality as the primary reason for claiming asylum, most had faced ridicule or inappropriate questions and only two had been successful in their claims.

There needs to be a clear UNHCR strategy for providing access to asylum in countries where same-sex conduct is criminalized

Recently released research by the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg which found widespread and systemic problems with the quality of refugee status determination decisions made by the Department of Home Affairs, highlighted the routine failure of Home Affairs officials to recognize sexual orientation as eligible grounds for asylum.

“I think it’s a general problem with training and knowledge of the law,” said ACMS researcher Roni Amit. “Also a lot of them replicate the same discriminatory views about LGBTI people as the general population.”

A 2008 UNHCR guidance note on refugee claims relating to sexual orientation and gender identity recommends that LGBTI applicants be interviewed by “trained officials who are well informed about the specific problems LGBTI persons face” but provides no guidance on how to fairly adjudicate claims from LGBTI people seeking asylum in countries that criminalize same-sex conduct.

Kenya and Uganda

“There needs to be a clear UNHCR strategy for providing access to asylum in countries where same-sex conduct is criminalized,” said Duncan Breen, who has conducted research on the plight of LGBTI refugees in Kenya and Uganda (both countries criminalize same-sex conduct) for US-based advocacy organization Human Rights First.

He noted that in countries where UNHCR officials conduct refugee status determination, such as Kenya, asylum applications based on sexual orientation or gender identity were more likely to be recognized than in countries where poorly trained government officials make such decisions.

In a report released by Human Rights First in May, Breen and his colleagues documented the many security risks faced by LGBTI refugees living in Kenya and Uganda and the threat of arrest if they attempt to seek police protection. Most responded either by frequently moving to new locations or by attempting to hide their sexual orientation or gender identity.

In such cases, said Breen, LGBTI refugees struggle to access vital support and resettlement in a third country was often the only long-term solution. Currently, few LGBTI refugees from Kenya and Uganda are resettled, but Breen said there is increasing awareness among resettlement countries and UNHCR of the dangers facing this group of refugees and their need for resettlement.

ks/cb
source www.irinnews.org

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